Seventy-five percent of respondents to PayScale’s survey who negotiated salary received some kind of raise, but many workers are still nervous about asking for more. In fact, 57 percent of respondents said they’d never negotiated salary in their current field.

Why don’t more workers negotiate? For the most part, fear and discomfort. Twenty-eight percent said they were uncomfortable negotiating salary; 8 percent said they were afraid that they’d lose their job.

Research shows that these fears are usually unfounded. For example, over half of hiring managers expect to negotiate starting salary, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey. Even if your boss (or prospective boss) can’t find the budget to give you a pay increase, chances are that they’ll take your request in stride.

Of course, there are always a few exceptions. In this week’s roundup, we look at expert advice for a worker who asked for a raise and got a weird response, plus how to get busy people to respond to your emails and how to optimize your resume for both robots and humans.

An Ask a Manager reader recently wrote in to say that they’d negotiated their raise, and received the requested amount … but also a very strange warning from their manager.

I was called in to her office today, and was told my request had been granted, but that she didn’t want me to approach future annual reviews as opportunities for negotiations because that would set a “weird” precedent. She did want me to work on a path towards a performance-based bonus program so that my very new department could be considered for performance incentives, which is something I’d expressed interest in, so I don’t think she was upset.

Still, I found the conversation today to be, well, weird. Is negotiating for a raise Not Done?

Short answer: negotiating is definitely OK, but there are sometimes other considerations to keep in mind when you’re deciding whether to go for it. Green explains, here.

“For me, the ability to send emails that work and get replies from Very Busy People essentially built the beginning of my career and has taken me to a place where I can pursue any path I would want to,” Slayback writes.

His secret: “make your emails easier to respond to than coming back to them later.” Find out how, in this article.

“It’s a fine line, but resume keyword stuffing is not the same thing as resume keyword optimization,” Shields writes. “Resume keyword stuffing is when an applicant overloads their resume with so many keywords that it is either A) no longer a true representation of their abilities, or B) geared towards the ATS technology with no regard for a human reader.”

In other words, it’s writing for the robots and forgetting about the humans on the other side of the software application. But, of course, you can’t afford to ignore keywords, either. Find out how to walk that fine line, here.

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